China is looking for alternatives to the chip blockade imposed by the United States. Several companies from the Asian country already They began to dismantle NVIDIA graphics cards to extract its components and install them on new boards. A report states that only one of these factories achieved convert thousands of GeForce RTX 4090 into artificial intelligence accelerators during December.
According to a newspaper report Financial Times, dozens of Chinese plants dismantle thousands of NVIDIA cards every month. According to the testimonies of factory managers and chip buyers, China has outlined a strategy to circumvent the Commerce Department’s veto that prevents the import of semiconductors into the country.
The measure, considered desperate by some experts, consists of recycle the most powerful graphics cards and mount their components on new boards. While the RTX 4090 is a beast to run Alan Wake 2 At maximum detail, they do not reach the same level when training large language models. However, that has not been an impediment for local companies to use them in their artificial intelligence projects.
According to sources, a factory dismantled 4,000 GeForce RTX 4090 in December. Graphics cards reached unprecedented demand after it was announced that they would stop being sold in China. NVIDIA removed the product from its Chinese online store in mid-November 2023, so the units were priced at more than double their original price ($1,500).
The United States blocked sales of A100 and H100 cards in September 2022. Joe Biden’s administration argued that China could use them to develop weapons of mass destruction. The ban was extended to the RTX 4090 at the end of 2023.
How to disassemble an RTX 4090 to turn it into an AI accelerator
A report of Tom’s Hardware mentions that several factories in China bought thousands of RTX 4090 cards before NVIDIA stopped the sale. The recycling process consists of remove the AD102 chips and GDDR6X memory modules to mount them on a reference board with a fan. The rest of the components are sold on the second-hand market.
Some leaked photos show dozens of cards stacked up waiting to be recycled. Others expose the board without the fan and the RTX 4090 racks designed to be used as artificial intelligence accelerators.
NVIDIA has said that tearing down gaming graphics cards is not a viable way to create compute clusters for artificial intelligence. Products, such as the RTX 4090, were designed, manufactured and marketed for the end consumer. Some analysts pointed out that recycling cards could violate the American company’s intellectual property.
To comply with current legislation, NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 4090D. This card is 5% slower than the 4090 in games, but has undergone other changes to its components that prevent it from being an alternative for those looking to train AI models in China.
One of the managers of these factories mentions that Reconstructed cards are sold to public companies and artificial intelligence laboratories. The measure would be temporary, as companies such as Huawei and Alibaba develop chips that will boost AI applications in China. Technology companies in that country compete to design and manufacture the most powerful chip that will be used by government institutions and the army of that country.